From Promising to Proven: A Wise Giver's Guide to Expanding on the Success of Charter Schools

By Karl Zinsmeister

Twenty-five years ago, charter schools hadn’t even been dreamed up. Today they are mushrooming across the country. There are 6,500 charter schools operating in 42 states, with more than 600 new ones opening every year. Within a blink there will be 3 million American children attending these freshly invented institutions (and 5 million students in them by the end of this decade).

It is philanthropy that has made all of this possible. Without generous donors, charter schools could never have rooted and multiplied in this way. And philanthropists have driven relentless annual improvements—better trained school founders, more prepared teachers, sharper curricula, smarter technology—that have allowed charter schools to churn out impressive results.

Studies show that student performance in charter schools is accelerating every year, as high-performing models replace weaker ones. Charter schools as a whole already exceed conventional schools in results. The top charters that are now growing so fast elevate student outcomes more than any other schools in the U.S.—especially among poor and minority children.

Charter schooling may be the most important social innovation of our age, and it is just beginning to boom. Philanthropists anxious to improve America have more opportunities to make a difference through charter schools than in almost any other way. This book provides the facts, examples, cautionaries, inspiration, research, and practical experience that philanthropists will need as charter schooling shifts gears from promising experiment to mainstream movement bringing improved opportunity to millions of students.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philanthropy Roundtable
• Release date: Mar 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9780989220248

Karl Zinsmeister

Karl Zinsmeister is the author of the book Dawn Over Baghdad: How the U.S. Military is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq. He is editor-in-chief of The American Enterprise, a national magazine of politics, business, and culture (TAEmag.com), and J. B. Fuqua Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a major Washington, D.C. research institute. His work has appeared in publications such as The American Enterprise, The Atlantic Monthly, Reader's Digest, the Wall Street Journal, and even a Marvel comic book series of real-life soldiers' tales.  A former assistant to U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Zinsmeister has been an advisor to research and policy groups, and has testified before Congressional committees and Presidential commissions many times. He appears often on television and radio programs. Zinsmeister lives with his wife and three children in rural upstate New York.

Book preview

The Philanthropy Roundtable

From Promising to Proven

A Wise Giver’s Guide to Expanding on the Success of Charter Schools

Karl Zinsmeister

Research assistance by Public Impact

Karl Zinsmeister, series editor

Copyright © 2014,The Philanthropy Roundtable. All rights reserved.

Published by The Philanthropy Roundtable

(Smashwords Edition)

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ISBN 978-0-9892202-4-8

LCCN 2014933932

First printing, March 2014

Table of Contents

Preface

1. A Breakthrough Decade for Charter Schools

• What’s distinctive about charter schools?

What are charter schools?

Important charter school innovations

Some broad strengths of charter schools

• Reaching critical mass?

Chart: U.S. students in charter schools

Table: Charter schools by state

Table: Charter schools by city

• Close-up on Houston

Table: Major Houston donors

• Close-up on New Orleans

• Going from C to A: Crummy charters cannot be ignored

• Donors have signed on

2. Increasing the Supply of Good Charters

• Found, expand, or support

• New individual schools

• Continued school invention is necessary

• Replication of existing schools

Some large nonprofit charter school operators

• The for-profit twist

Examples of national for-profit charter school operators

• When bringing in a multi-campus operator may be smart

• A brief look at some fast-expanding nonprofit charter school networks

KIPP Schools

Achievement First

Uncommon Schools

Aspire Public Schools

Rocketship Education

BASIS Schools Great

Hearts Academies

• Replicating at an earlier stage

• Intermediary organizations that donors could support

• An effort that offers charters equal footing

• Other kinds of support: advocacy, business aid, data systems

• Lots of opportunities to act

3. Improving School Quality and Accountability

• Tougher authorizing

• Donors emphasize school quality

• Putting money behind report cards

• What exactly does the latest research say about charter quality?

• Closure: The case for pruning the charter school orchard

• A school closure strategy that would dramatically improve any city

• Lessons from a funder turned authorizer

4. Bringing Top Teachers and Principals to Charters

• Teachers who make their pupils better

• Expanding the supply of excellent teachers

• New ways of training teachers

• Elevating principals and new school founders

• Cultivating leadership at the top

• Board development

5. Encouraging Public Policies that Help Charters Flourish

• Dipping into a big tool bag

• The necessity of politics

Sidebar: What’s allowed in policy advocacy?

• The grassroots antidote to criticism

• A treetops strategy can also work

• National programs as an alternative to home-grown organizing

• State-level advocacy

• A menu of other advocates Is eroding monopolies the ultimate policy reform?

6. Solving Special Operational Issues

• Giving charter schools direct support for facilities

• Giving to organizations that help charters find buildings

• Handling back-office services more efficiently

• Meeting specialized needs

• Offering a rounded education

• Blending teachers and technology

• Helping districts learn from charters

Districts exploring a School Portfolio approach ...

... And the Seven Principles they are asked to pursue

• Operating portfolio school districts in real life

7. Menus of Possible Investments

• $10k-$100k

• $100k-$500k

• $500k+

About The Philanthropy Roundtable

About the Author

Preface

Charter Schools Are Taking Off

When you ask America’s most seasoned and effective K-12 education givers which philanthropic investments have been most transformative over the last generation, charter schools rank at or near the top. For all of the inconsistency that exists within the sector, it has proven to be the laboratory, workhorse, and guiding light of K-12 education. Thousands of charter schools around the nation offer dramatically better options than students would otherwise receive. This is especially true for students from lower-income neighborhoods.

Charters are expanding rapidly. For the sector to live up to its creed—autonomy to develop schools that perform better than traditional options, in exchange for accountability for results—philanthropists must make quality the watchword. Charter schooling is not without its failures and pitfalls. Philanthropists investing in charters must give in a wise and informed way.

Donors large and small, many profiled in this guidebook, have shown that philanthropy can fuel sustained charter school growth. The most sophisticated use their giving to also undergird excellence and shape public policy to promote innovation, autonomy, and accountability. The flowering of charter schools has been led by philanthropy, and donors must continue in their leading role if today’s millions of children still unable to access a quality education are to gain a better option. Exciting work remains.

The Philanthropy Roundtable gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and Mrs. Donald G. Fisher toward the publication of this guidebook.

Whatever your funding priorities, if you would like to enter a network of hundreds of top donors from across the country who share lessons learned and debate future strategies, we hope you will consider joining The Philanthropy Roundtable. We offer intellectually challenging and solicitation-free meetings, customized resources, consulting, and private seminars for our members, all at no charge.

For more information, please feel free to contact any of us at [e-mail] or [phone].

Adam Meyerson

President

The Philanthropy Roundtable

Dan Fishman, Director

Anthony Pienta, Deputy Director

K–12 education programs

Chapter 1: A Breakthrough Decade for Charter Schools

For years, philanthropists large and small have labored to improve student outcomes at ineffective public schools. From the Ford Foundation’s decades of interventions, to hordes of concerned corporate donors hoping to encourage excellence, to the $1.1 billion spent as a result of Walter Annenberg’s philanthropic challenge, these donors ended up with shockingly little to show for their large efforts.

Then in 1991, Minnesota pioneered the concept of public schools operated by nonprofits or other independent parties. Teachers and leaders in these schools were given great autonomy, but faced closure if the school didn’t show good student results. California passed a similar law the next year. The first charter school opened in 1992.

Beginning from nothing, the charter school movement took root slowly. At year ten, the total number of American children in charters passed half a million. And donors began to notice some startling patterns.

Bill Gates explains that after his foundation decided in the mid-1990s to focus on U.S. schooling, it poured about $2 billion into various education experiments. During their first decade, he reports, many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way. There was, however, one fascinating exception. A few of the schools that we funded achieved something amazing. They replaced schools with low expectations and low results with ones that have high expectations and high results. And there was a common variable: Almost all of these schools were charter schools.

Other philanthropists had the same experience. Eli Broad, one of the biggest givers to education in the U.S., observed that charter school systems are delivering the best student outcomes, particularly for poor and minority students. They are performing significantly better than the best traditional school district systems. Ted Mitchell of the NewSchools Venture Fund drew some bold bottom lines: Good charter schools have pretty much eliminated the high-school dropout rate. And they’ve doubled the college-going rate of underserved kids.

In recent years, the number, variety, and quality of charter schools started to soar. By 2014 there were 2.6 million children attending 6,500 charter schools in the U.S. Every year now, more than 600 new charters open their doors for the first time, and an additional 300,000 children enroll (while a million kids remain on waiting lists, with millions more hungrily waiting in the wings). Charter school attendance began to particularly accelerate around 2009, and as this is written in 2014 it looks like there may be 5 million children in charters before the end of the decade.

There are great charter schools and poor charter schools, and the charter sector as a whole has weaknesses as well as strengths. We’ll examine these problems in this book. The charter boom, though, is only going to get bigger. All but eight states are now experimenting with charters. Already, one out of every 19 American schoolchildren is enrolled in a charter school, and by five years from now that is likely to double to one out of every nine.

There is an argument to be made that charter schooling is the most important social innovation in America of the past generation. And it bubbled up spontaneously from our grassroots, without much establishment support. To its very marrow, it is a product of independent social entrepreneurs and private philanthropy.

What’s distinctive about charter schools?

First let’s get some general facts on the table.

What are charter schools?

• Public schools, funded with public money

• Privately managed (by organizations chartered by a public authority)

• Must meet the same graduation requirements as other schools

• Open to all, and tuition-free for every student

• Often aided by philanthropy (because public funding for operations averages only four fifths of the level enjoyed by other public schools, and facilities are often not funded in any way)

• Have no claim to neighborhood students; families must choose the school

• Select students randomly by lottery when applicants exceed available slots

• Operate autonomously, free of many of the conventions and union rules that district schools follow

• Can be a stand-alone school, or part of a network of charter schools; can be nonprofit or for-profit

• Frequently specialize to meet the needs of targeted students (dropouts, math achievers, artists, English-language learners, etc.)

• Two thirds of existing charter students are minorities; approximately the same proportion are low-income

• Charter schools are subject to closure if they fail to improve student achievement

More consequential innovations in educational practice have bubbled up out of charter schools over the past two decades than from the rest of our K-12 schools combined. Following are some areas where charters have led the way.

Important charter school innovations

• Longer school days

• Longer school years

• Higher expectations for students (e.g. 100 percent college acceptance at many leading inner-city charters)

• Recruitment of excellent teachers outside of traditional credential channels

• Linking compensation to student results, yielding better pay for more effective teachers

• Stricter discipline; more structured school day

• Asking parents and students to sign contracts that commit them to serious duties that parallel the school’s efforts to teach

• Experiments with advancement by demonstrated competency in a subject, rather than rigid age or grade levels

• Curricular invention—like blended learning and other technology leaps, more AP classes, Core Knowledge instruction, special science and engineering programs, etc.

• More rigorous testing that is shared with parents, regulators, and public to aid assessment of school quality (including standardized tests, PISA tests, and the highly personalized testing at the heart of blended learning)

Some broad strengths of charter schools

• They attract more entrepreneurial principals and teachers into the field of education

• School autonomy allows wide experimentation with new ways of educating

• This same flexibility is used to circumvent bureaucratic obstacles that often block conventional schools from succeeding

• Charters sidestep the dysfunctional labor relations of many urban districts

• They erode monopolies and introduce competitive energy into public education

• Research shows that charters are more effective at recruiting teachers who graduated in the top third of their college class

• Charters give parents who cannot afford private schools, or moving, another choice besides their neighborhood school

• They give nonprofits and community organizations practical opportunities to improve the education of local children

• Their emphasis on student outcomes fosters greater accountability for results

• By functioning as laboratories and alternatives, charters foment change in conventional schools as well

The structural strengths of charter schools can cumulate to produce dramatic successes. In the 2013 U.S. News and World Report rankings of public high schools, for instance, 41 charters made it into the top 200. Given that charter schools represent about 5 percent of the high-school market, a finding that 21 percent of our best institutions are charters is an impressive over-representation.

Perhaps even more impressive is the repeatedly demonstrated ability of top charter schools to take cohorts of students that are 80 or 90 percent disadvantaged and turn far-above-average proportions of them into high-school graduates, college students, and successful adults. Here are a few snapshots pulled from a very long movie reel of successes:

• The 9,000 students at Uncommon Schools are 78 percent low-income and 98 percent African-American or Hispanic, yet all seniors take the SAT, and their average score is 20 points above the college-readiness benchmark

• At KIPP charter schools, home to 51,000 pupils in 21 states, 96 percent of eighth graders perform better than their local district counterparts on reading, and 92 percent perform better in math

• Among charter school students in Washington, D.C. (almost half of that city’s public school population), the on-time high-school graduation rate is 21 percentage points higher than that among conventional school students: 77 percent to 56 percent

• In New Orleans—long an educational disaster zone—the city schools rank first in the state for student growth now that more than eight out of ten students attend charters (some details on the Big Easy’s charter experience will follow in just a few pages)

Reaching critical mass?

With the promise they have shown, it’s no surprise that the audience for charter schools should have mushroomed the way it has in recent years.

This growth has not been at all geographically even. There are many places the charter school revolution has not yet touched, and other places that are hotspots. California is the state with more charter schools than any other—1,130 schools that are educating 8 percent of all the state’s schoolchildren. On a percentage basis, the most advanced state is Arizona, where one out of every six kids is enrolled in a charter (605 schools).

Here are the states leading the charter parade:

The fraction of all children attending charters rises even higher in particular metro areas. These are the cities where charter schools currently have the highest market share: